Suds to flow again at local beer festival

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This article was published 17/08/2022 (1285 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The beer is flowing again for one Brandon festival after a multi-year pandemic-induced hiatus.

While the Sunset Rotary Brandon Beer Festival is being held later than normal, on Sept. 17, and there will be fewer vendors, the event is going ahead because everyone involved was eager to get on with it, said organizer Sheri Connery.

“We wanted to get back into this. We usually do this in April as a way to kick-start the summer with the tag ‘find your summer beverage,’ but we kept rebooking the date and postponing,” said Connery. “We normally have about 30 tables and 90 beers, seltzers, meads and hard ciders. This time, though, we have 20 tables and a little more than 60 beers and other drinks.”

There will be another beer festival at its usual time in April, Connery added, but the price of tickets will increase slightly. Having a festival now will allow the Rotary Club to honour the ticket holders who have been waiting for nearly three years.

The scaled-down presence is due to a few factors. The Winnipeg Wine Festival starts the next day, and they are missing some of the regular attendees because of the timing. Summer and early fall is traditionally a very busy time for breweries, but organizers wanted to go for this date and have as many vendors as they could get.

It may be smaller, but this is a rebuild year. Connery said everyone who couldn’t join them for the September event will likely be at the April iteration.

This festival is as much about community support as it is about the drinks. Sunset Rotary has a large coverage area, from Saskatchewan to northwestern Ontario, and helps many community initiatives. All proceeds from ticket sales are going to help charities within its coverage area.

A few of the breweries being featured were just getting started in 2019 and have grown since then, Connery said. There will be some larger companies, like Labatt, that will be there, but as with every festival, the focus will be on local. It’s also a great way to advertise the club and canvass for volunteers. They are needed more than ever, Connery said, as their numbers have dropped by half in the past 10 years.

Anyone is welcome to join, but they are hoping for more younger people.

“When I was young, a lot of the events we went to were run by volunteer organizations. Now, with most of us middle aged or senior, it’s harder to get younger people involved,” she said. “Rotary still does a lot of great services, and we really want to keep that going. Many organizations depend on us to help them fundraise and run events.”

The September event is going to be a special one because there will be one Brandon-based brewery attending, Black Wheat Brewing, which opened its 10th Street tap room and brewery in August 2021.

“It’s our town, so we are going to have a good presence,” Black Wheat co-owner Ted Birch said. “We’ll definitely be bringing four anniversary beers. You can only bring so many to an event like this, so we are bringing the special ones.”

This Saturday, Black Wheat will also be at the Hops and Props beer-tasting event at the Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum.

Tastings and festivals are a great way to get the public out to venues, Birch said. It also shows how much breweries contribute to the local economy and culture. They have local staff, buy local product and sell local.

It allows the public to taste beers available at their home location because liquor marts only have so much shelf space.

“We brew a wider variety than, say, larger breweries because we need to appeal to a broader customer base,” he said. “The larger breweries can do that one or two beers well and sell across a large market, but we are smaller, so we need to brew more variety so we can have that one beer one person will like.”

Festivals like this are integral to the brewing industry because it’s important to let the public sample their product, or what is known as “liquid to lips,” explained Laurence Warwaruk, co-owner of Farmery Estate Brewery in Neepawa. The company will be returning to the festival, and it’s still the only rural-based brewery in Manitoba.

“Festivals like this are how we get in front of our audience,” Warwaruk said. “This creates more awareness around local production and that is our key focus — encourage more people to seek out local, understand how much of a difference purchasing locally produced products makes. That is the best impact someone can make on our local economy.”

The Sunset Rotary Brandon Beer Festival will take place at the Victoria Inn Imperial Ballroom. Tickets are on sale on Eventbrite, but all tickets bought for the 2020 festival will be honoured.

To get tickets, go to bit.ly/3SNCDJA.

» kmckinley@brandonsun.com

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